Judy Malloy, Uncle Roger: The Blue Notebook

About the Artist

With a literary and visual arts background that includes artists books, text-based installation art, and narrative performance art, and with experience as a computer programmer for early library systems, Judy Malloy is a poet who works at the conjunction of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art.

Her work with nonsequential literature began in 1976, the year she started exploring nonsequential narrative in experimental artists books. In subsequent years, she created a series of card catalog artists books that were first exhibited as a series in the exhibition Judy Malloy3X5, Visual Card Catalogs at Artworks, in Venice, California in 1979. The first artists book in her series of push-button electromechanical books was created for her installation Technical Information at SITE in San Francisco in 1981. Then, in August of 1986, she began writing and programming the hyperfiction Uncle Roger, which was first released on the BBS of Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL in December 1986.

In addition to Uncle Roger, Judy Malloy’s electronic literature includes the generative hypertext its name was Penelope; (Richmond Art Center, 1999, Eastgate, 1993) called by writer and critic Robert Coover one of the classics of the “golden age” of hyperfiction; the polyphonic narrative Wasting Time; (After the Book, Perforations 3, Summer, 1992) the early web hyperfiction L0ve0ne; (Eastgate Web Workshop, 1994) the collaborative hyperfiction Forward Anywhere; (with Cathy Marshall, Eastgate, 1996, created under the auspices of Xerox PARC) Paths of Memory and Painting (2010) composed with composite arrays of hypertext lexias; and most recently, From Ireland with Letters, an epic polychoral electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet.

Her work has been exhibited and published internationally including the San Francisco Art Institute; Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; Sao Paulo Biennial; the Library of Congress, National Library of Madrid; National Library of Portugal, Lisbon; Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art; Boston Cyberarts Festival; Walker Art Center; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; University of Arizona Museum of Art; Visual Studies Workshop; the Electronic Literature Organization; Universite Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne; Eastgate Systems; E .P. Dutton; Tanam Press; Seal Press; MIT Press; The Iowa Review Web, and Blue Moon Review, among many others. Parts of her recent work Paths of Memory and Painting have been exhibited or presented at the Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable, the E-Poetry Festival at the Center of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and the University of California Irvine, as well as short listed for the Prix poesie-media 2009, Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne. In 2012, her work was given a retrospective at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Her papers — including the original notebooks and programs for Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope — are archived as The Judy Malloy Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University

Judy Malloy has also been active in documenting the electronic arts and is the host of Authoring Software, a resource for teachers and students. She has been an artist in residence and consultant in the document of the future for Xerox PARC, taught as Visiting Faculty in the Digital Media program at the San Francisco Art Institute and is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Literary Advisory Board. In the fall semester of 2013, she is Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University, where she will be teaching a seminar on Social Media: History, Poetics, and Practice.

As an arts writer, she has worked most notably as Editor of the MIT Press book, Women, Art, and Technology, as Editor of The New York Foundation for the Arts’ NYFA Current, (originally Arts Wire Current) an Internet-based National journal on the arts and culture; and as an Associate Editor for Leonardo.

She believes that ideally print literature and electronic literature are parallel art forms where writers and artists in each medium understand each other’s vision and, as between poetry and fiction, sometimes move with ease between print and screen.

Artist’s Statement

Intertwining elements of magic realism with Silicon Valley culture and semiconductor industry lore, the three files of the pioneering electronic hyperfiction, Uncle Roger, originally appeared beginning in 1986 on Art Com Electronic Network on The WELL. In the 27 years since the work began, it has been authored as a social network intervention, with UNIX shell scripts; on floppy disk with BASIC; and on the World Wide Web with HTML. In File II of Uncle Roger, “The Blue Notebook”, reflecting the increasing complexities of the narrator’s Silicon Valley life, five parallel narratives advance the story at the will of the reader. Some of the text is taken from the narrator’s notebook where, as she explains: “The things I wrote in the blue notebook didn’t happen in exactly the way I wrote them.”

“Everything I typed on the keyboard”showed up on a large screenwhich filled the entire wall at the front of the room.Five men in tan suits were sitting around the screen,watching the words as I typed them in.”

In the spring of 1986, I was invited by video and performance art curator Carl Loeffler, to go online and participate in the seminal Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The WELL, where ACEN Datanet, an interactive online publication, would soon feature computer-mediated works of text-based art, including works by John Cage, Jim Rosenberg, and my interactive Uncle Roger.

Once in a while in a lifetime, everything comes together. In 1986, it was my experience in database programming, the idea I had been working on since 1977 of using molecular narrative units to create nonsequential narrative, the availability of personal computers that would make what I had been trying to do with “card catalog” artists books more feasible, and the arrival of Art Com Electronic Network, a place to create, publish and discuss the work.

In August 1986, for publication on ACEN, I began writing and designing the interface and programs for the hyperfictional narrative database, Uncle Roger. And in the process, I created an authoring system — Narrabase — which I have continued to develop for my work for 27 years.

A seminal interactive hyperfiction for command line computer platforms, Uncle Roger is based on a narrative and creative use of links. (originally called keywords from the database algorithms that informed this work) The composing of the three files that comprise Uncle Roger was influenced by my experimental artists books, by my experience with library database programming, by the slide-based narratives I performed at alternative art spaces in the early 80’s, and by scene-based Renaissance comedy.

The Story

“I pictured a whole line of men in tan suits
scampering around on a stage, singing
“The yield is down. I think we lost the process.”
The chorus was “We lost it in the submicron area,”
which is what Jack said next.”

ACEN’s host, The WELL was (and still is) a pioneering Northern California-based social media environment, which hosted digerati from all over the World, including Silicon Valley, where I had once lived. Thus, at the timethat Uncle Roger was created, I was immersed in 1980’s San Francisco Bay Area personal computer culture. With locations including a party in Woodside, a microelectronics lab, and an early corporate word-processing office, Uncle Roger, like the interface and the programs with which it was created, is set in this era of transitioning computer culture. Events are observed by a narrator, who in telling the story intertwines elements of magic realism with Silicon Valley culture and semiconductor industry lore.

Files 1 and 2 are interactive hypertexts in which the reader actively follows chains of links through the narrative — either one link or combinations of links using the Boolean operator “and” (“men in tan suits” and “dreams”, for instance) — and then returns to the beginning to follow another link or combination of links.

Simulating the diffuse, unsettled quality of the narrator’s changing life, the third file is generative.

The Three Files of Uncle Roger

“What I type on the keyboard appears in greenon the screen which is called the monitor.When the screen is full, the lettersscroll up somewhere inside the machine.”

The following background information about each file of Uncle Roger is from the packaging of the original Apple II Applesoft BASIC version.

“A Party in Woodside”
During a long, mostly sleepless night after, a party is remembered fitfully, interspersed with dreams. Like a guest at a real party, you hear snatches of conversation and catch fleeting glimpses of both strangers and old friends. There are occurrences which you never observe. You meet people whom others may never meet. A fragmented, individual memory picture of the party emerges.

“The Blue Notebook”
In The Blue Notebook, the story is continued by the narrator, Jenny. The narrative is framed by a formal birthday party for Tom Broadthrow at a hotel restaurant. Jenny’s fragmented memories — a car trip with David, a visit to Jeff’s company in San Jose, an encounter with Uncle Roger in the restaurant bathroom – weave in and out of the birthday party recollections. Some of the text is taken from Jenny’s blue notebook where, as she she explains: “The things I wrote in the blue notebook didn’t happen in exactly the way I wrote them.”

“Terminals”
In January the narrator, Jenny, left the Broadthrow family and started working for a market research firm in San Francisco. As Jenny sits at her desk, memories of a Christmas party in Woodside, a trip back East for the Holidays and other things that happened come and go in her mind.

More about “The Blue Notebook”

“We walked through a doorinto a vast expanse of gray cement floors.There were no windows.Rows of benches were covered with black and silver equipment; piles of cables;boxes of small objects encrusted with wires;microscopes; tv screens;clear plastic boxes with holes in them; surgical gloves.In the back exposed pipesalternated with ten foot tall machines.”

In Silicon Valley, things do not happen simply and clearly. In File 2 of Uncle Roger, “The Blue Notebook”, five parallel yet intertwining narratives advance the story in sometimes conflicting ways — reflecting the increasing complexity of Jenny’s life.

The story is framed by a formal birthday party for a microelectronics company president. His party — in a Silicon Valley hotel dining room — is punctuated by the narrator’s unlikely encounter with the eccentric semiconductor market analyst Uncle Roger. And while Jenny sits at the banquet table, other narrative threads — a car trip with a former lover, a visit to a semiconductor house in San Jose — come and go in her mind.

Parts of the story are taken from her notebook where reality is difficult to separate from fiction and dream: “The things I wrote in the blue notebook didn’t happen in exactly the way I wrote them.”

Technical Information

“It’s an FX-7000G ,” said one of the men
in tan suits. He pulled a thin calculator
out of his pocket. The other two men leaned
over the calculator while he pushed some buttons.
Small grey graphs appeared
on the tiny green screen.”

Uncle Roger was first told online on the ACEN conferencing system on The WELL, beginning in 1986. Beginning in 1987, it was published online as a working hypernarrative, programmed with UNIX shell scripts on ACEN Datanet. It was also self-published as computer software, programmed with BASIC for both Apple and IBM-compatible computers and distributed by the Art Com Catalog, (a video and small press distributor) as well as exhibited internationally in the traveling exhibition Art Com Software.

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About Pathfinders

The Pathfinders project is led by Dr. Dene Grigar, Director and Associate Professor of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver; and Dr. Stuart Moulthrop, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. The project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.